Sunday, 24 March 2013

Sunday brunch – homemade brioche

We had freshly baked brioche for brunch this
morning. It was melt-in-the-mouth delicious, and very, very light. I made the
dough yesterday, so all I had to do was pop it in the oven when I got up.

Brioche

I used Paul Hollywood’s recipe from ‘how to
bake’. It is seriously good. I’ve made a few recipes from the book now, and all
have worked perfectly and taste great.

You will need:

500g strong, white flour

7g of salt

50g of castor sugar

10g of instant yeast

140ml of warm, full fat milk

5 medium eggs

250g of soft, unsalted butter

Get your mixer out, and add the flour to
the bowl. Put the salt and sugar to one side and the yeast to the other. Pour
in the milk and the eggs, and mix on a slow setting for about two minutes. Turn
up the power to medium and mix at this speed for another 6-8 minutes, until
your dough is elastic and soft.

Cut your butter up into squares and add
this to the dough, mixing it well for about another five minutes. Stop the
mixer every now and again to scrape down the sides. Make sure that the butter
is well mixed though. Your dough should be smooth and very soft. I’ve been
trying to think of what the texture is like. This was my first time making a
rich dough. All I can think of is, it reminds me of soft butter. The colour and
smell were divine, and the texture was very soft.

Tip the dough into a plastic container. I’m
usually quite open to interpreting recipes (sometimes very liberally), but the
recipe says a plastic container, so I followed it to the letter. I don’t know
if you could keep it in the mixing bowl and get the same results (mine is
metal). If you know better than I do, let me know in the comments below! Cover
the dish and chill it for at least seven hours.

After the seven hours, the dough had
metamorphasised. The squishy dough had firmed up significantly and it was much
easier to manipulate.

You’ll need to grease a 25cm round tin at
this stage. It doesn’t need to be lined.

Flour your work surface and tip your dough
out onto it. Fold it over onto itself a couple of times to knock some of the
air out. Divide it into nine similar-sized pieces. Eight of these can go around
the edge of your tin, and the ninth goes into the centre.

Balls of brioche, ready to prove

Cover this with a clean plastic bag or
clingfilm and leave it to prove for another 2-3 hours. I did all of this on
Saturday afternoon and left the dough to prove overnight in my kitchen. Your
dough should rise again.

When you’re ready to bake, heat your oven
to 190°c. Bake your dough for 20-30 minutes – mine took about 35 minutes. When
it’s done, put it on a wire rack to cool for a bit. We ate ours still warm from
the oven with raspberry jam.

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About Me

Hello! I'm Katie, and I've been living in Belgium for about ten years. Belgian food is delicious, but sometimes you just need something that reminds you of home. Finding this can pose a problem in Belgium, so I often make this from scratch. I don't grow our own or milk cows or anything like that, but I do cook with food that my grandmother would recognise.
I also love Asian and Indian food and I often make this too (it’s the only way to guarantee you get the spiciness you need!). I try to cook low-fat, although some things I just refuse to meddle with (such as sticky toffee pudding). I'll be blogging about my kitchen (mis)adventures here.

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